Comics and Machines Conference

We are pleased to announce a two-day international conference on April 22-23, 2026 at the Royal Institute of Technology and at Uppsala University dedicated to examining the rapidly evolving landscape of comics. Rather than framing this transformation solely as a rupture, the conference seeks to situate it within a longer history of computational rationality— a lineage in which the medium has continuously negotiated the demands of efficiency, scalability, and technical constraint. Our aim is to critically rethink comics not as passive recipients of technological change, but as active computational configurations: media fundamentally entangled with systems of automation, standardization, and information processing.